Centenary of women's political rights in Finland

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Who has the right to represent the "will of the people"? New questions on the fight for suffrage

Jaana Kuusipalo

It is a remarkable fact of Finnish history that both men and women were granted full political rights at the same time. Women candidates recruited, in particular, by the women's organisations of political parties won 10% of the seats in the very first parliamentary elections (1907). In the following elections (1908), 13% of the successful candidates were women. Many Western countries did not reach similar figures until the 1980s and the 1990s. But what did these women elected as "representatives of the people" actually represent?

Although political rights are associated with citizenship, the latter can also be seen as the duty to do what is best for society. Feminist research has shown that "civic citizenship" was a gendered concept that produced women citizens whose identity was based on maternity (Lister 1997; Squires 1999). Maternalism, on the other hand, refers to political action based on an identity of maternal citizenship (e.g., Pateman 1992). Finnish researchers have used the concept of social motherhood for this phenomenon (Sulkunen 1987, 167; Anttonen & Henriksson & Nätkin 1994; Anttonen 1997, 172-173). But in what way did this notion of citizenship actually steer feminist thought and action in Finland?

Sulkunen (1987, 165-167) has noted that women's rights advocates fought to extend the maternalist mentality to politics. This same notion was adopted by an increasing number of women in the 1920s and the 1930s through the "homemaker movement" (Ollila 1993) and the women’s organisation of the Social Democratic Party (Sulkunen 1989). But what has been neglected in research is the way in which the idea of "democratic maternal citizenship", which encompassed "a woman's right to represent women", culminated in the fight for suffrage. It was precisely this idea that shaped women’s political activity in Finland at least until the 1980s. Until this decade, "women" were represented in politics mainly by the women’s organisations of political parties (Kuusipalo 1999). On the other hand, this emphasis on the woman's perspective in Finnish feminism during the 1980s and the 1990s may arguably be seen as a warmed-up version of the old notion of women's representation.

According to feminist theory, the term "women" is the subject of feminist discourse and is used to legitimise the political representation of women (Butler 1990; 1998, 273). The political role played by "women" is often taken as a given. This presupposition should not go unchallenged. For example, it is important to ask how the maternal political subject that women were seen to represent in politics was constructed in the fight for suffrage. Feminism challenges prevailing cultural gender roles by disputing the masculine subject produced by the current political discourse; this was also the fate of the liberalist construction of the individual subject (cf. Scott 1996; 1999, 207) whose rights were denied to women. But because feminism is a product of the prevailing political discourse, its own subject is also produced within the framework of that discourse. This was demonstrated by the acceptance of the nationalist idea of "maternal citizenship" as the foundation for feminist action.

Therefore, when seeking the subject of feminism, it is important to take into consideration the discursive context in which that subject is constructed, especially since the political subject is understood in different ways in different traditions of political theory. Modern political theory can be roughly divided on the basis of its ontology into the liberal tradition, which is founded on the category of the individual, and into the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of a collective political subject (Pulkkinen 1996). When discussing the Finnish case, it would make sense to focus on the latter tradition because the nationalist movement that was behind the construction of Finland as a nation state was inspired by the theory of the state developed by Hegel and Snellman, although in the 20 th century this theory was gradually infused with liberal political theory. But we should focus on the communal tradition also because the workers' movement played a key role in defining democratic citizenship in Finland.

The fight for suffrage from 1905 to 1906 was also a discursive fight for the subject of modern political representation. The feminist movement participated in this fight. By analysing the process, it is possible to get an idea of the feminist subject whose representation was also at stake in the fight for suffrage. It should be remembered that before the advent of the feminist movement, women were not accepted into the category of the individual citizen in liberal political theory, nor were women seen as capable of interpreting Hegel's "common will" or Snellman's "national spirit". Moreover, most women workers were not considered as doing productive work in the sense that it would have entitled them, being conscious of the historical mission of their class, to interpret the will of the "working class". Feminism challenged the idea of subjects that can be represented by men only.

How then did Finnish women get to represent the "will of the people" that appeared to prevail in the fight for the subject of democratic representation in 1906? This outcome may be attributed to both "Fennoman feminism" (the bourgeois women's movement) and "socialist feminism" (the women’s movement among the working class). To be sure, the differences and tensions between these two movements and the way they understood women's citizenship and "women's" political representation also help to explain the outcome of the fight for women's suffrage. The interesting question is how women's presence in Parliament (cf. Phillips 1995) was finally legitimised.

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